


Left Behind

by doggie015



Category: Seveneves - Neal Stephenson
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-31
Packaged: 2020-02-21 14:57:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18704644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doggie015/pseuds/doggie015
Summary: The archived diary of generations left behind after the hard rain.





	1. Prologue

The experts call it “The hard rain”, Some call it “Armageddon”, some “Maitreya”, some “al-Qiyamah”. All ways of saying “Basically everyone is 50 shades of fucked”.

What was once the moon had exploded, and was being torn apart by earth’s gravity. Nobody knows how or why it happened, but it happened and now the earth is destined to have a very tough time of it, indeed, as extremely large quantities of debris from what was the moon is destined to enter the atmosphere. So many of these entries will be occurring that the earth’s atmosphere and surface will be superheated. Ice caps melting, oceans boiling, basically hell on earth. And this will last for thousands of years.

And we have just two years until it starts. I need a way to live out the rest of my days without being incinerated. The space ark is out of the question, no way in hell that I will be able to get up there. Apparently some poor bastard wants to take a submarine down to the marianas trench and cross their fingers that it doesn’t become an oven.

I, however, plan to survive underground, using the thermal energy through stirling engines to cool my shelter and cryogenically separate carbon dioxide from the air. I would need to get oxygen from the existing atmosphere, so I would need to find a way to keep the materials for the intake cool, and a way to actually get rid of all the generated heat in an already superheated atmosphere. Undoubtedly, the crust will also absorb some heat from the atmosphere.

It could very well be the case that it is an impossible endeavour. But I have to try. And I am not alone. I’ve already raised a small army of tradesmen, contractors, intellectuals, thermal dynamics experts, excavation workers and so on to build the bunker. Them and their families are granted entry, along with a selection of other people. Unlike in space or on a submarine, I can build this bunker as large as I like and accommodate more than enough people for enough genetic diversity to last several hundred generations if needed.

The location was proving fairly difficult to find, until someone found an old salt mine, complete with elevator shaft. Repairing the elevator took a couple of months, but once that was done, it was easy enough to get things sorted out to commence construction and continue even after the hard rain starts. This way, we could construct the shell and vital facilities to make sure that everything works and there are no major issues before the hard rain starts, then fill out the shell with leisure facilities during the rain. It’ll be a good base even after everything cools down.

Even better, the owner of the mine already had a similar plan.

Another perk of having no major spacial or mass restrictions is to take advantage of hydroponics and grow crops to both replenish the air and provide food. The tricky part is water, both collecting it and storing it without it boiling away. The tanks would need to be integrated to the cooling system, and the entire compound would have to be one large building, as cooling the entire mine would be impossible, even without the large amount of heat expected outside of it.

I suppose I am writing this as a diary of what happens during the rain - however many generations it lasts.


	2. Day 1

This is it. The Hard rain is here. We just finished sealing the exit. The mine’s owner insisted on staying out for as long as possible. Talking via morse code to Izzy until he had to go in due to the heat.

The cloud ark plan seems to have worked. Izzy became a long string of dots rather than just the one as the “Arklets” were sent up. Of course, the white sky quickly rendered it invisible just a couple of days ago. Thanks to the “8-ball”, things kicked off far sooner than initially expected. But we were ready ahead of time anyway. By now the deaths will have started in the billions as the air itself becomes hot enough to burn the airways. A few hundred or thousand might be in crude shelters, but the majority of those are just glorified walk-in ovens at this point.

The last two years have been a frenzy of planning and construction with an ominously large number of crossed fingers. Power is provided by a set of long tubes with solid-state thermoelectric generators on both ends. One end was up near the surface, the other sent as deep as possible into the earth’s crust as even during the hottest time of the hard rain, there will always be a temperature differential between the atmosphere and the mantle. And where there is a temperature differential, there is work that can be done. Ammonia flowed passively up and down, establishing a convection loop carrying heat to the atmosphere and cooling back down near the mantle. 5 millenia lifetime meant it had to be a “Set and forget” power generation system. No moving parts means no maintenance.

Air is provided from the atmosphere via precoolers. Carbon dioxide scrubbing is done by freeze separation at -65 celcius, as carbon dioxide liquifies first, it is precipitated out and stored while the cooled oxygen flows up to the precoolers, then it flows back into the ventilation system. Stored carbon dioxide is split, with the carbon going into material for the food production system and the oxygen going back into the atmosphere.

Nobody even knows if our descendants will be considered the same species once the rain ends, or what state the planet will be left in. At the end of the day, there really is only one way to find out...


	3. Day 2

The hymn is still bouncing around my head. Bread of Heaven, what we sung as we sealed up the habitat after reeling in the owner. It was audible even over the noise of the welders and earthmoving equipment. We’re firmly sealed inside not just our tomb, but the tomb of thousands of generations. It’s a very existential dread that we share with nothing to do but breed to maintain population and eventually die.

The “Can”, as it became to be known, is fully stocked with provisions estimated to last only a few years while we establish regular crops from the hydroponics, as well as a complete Encyclopedia Britannica and a whole metric butt-ton of 100% cotton “paper” for handwriting copies as the original books wear out. We have to assume that we are the last humans alive on earth, those in the space ark are viewed with some jealousy as they don’t have to worry about the literally billions of tons of debris coming crashing down on their heads. We need to maintain the human race at all costs.

We need to manage all of our supplies carefully. We’re only one day into our 5,000 year wait, with no chance for resupply. We even need to be careful with our Oxygen and Water, as the impacts dump god only knows what into the atmosphere, and we could just end up sucking the atmosphere completely dry of these precious resources. If the atmosphere does end up becoming toxic, we will need to find a way to terraform the planet.

Today we established “The Committee” - our form of government that ultimately makes the decisions down here. Due to limited population, full blown democracy is impossible, so it is more of a group monarchy type thing - The Committee is the king, each person in the committee is equal. Their decisions are law. I was not drafted into this Committee, but am happy to live under its rule. At the end of the day, living under their rule is better than being incinerated upon the surface.

While we’re not confined to tiny habitats needing to “Bolo” for gravity, we are still trapped together underground, so division is all but impossible. Everybody is going to need to agree with the Committee. I suspect that in 9 months time, the first generation of cave dwellers is going to arrive. We’re going to have to raise them specifically so that the human race can survive, and we have absolutely no idea how we are going to make that happen.


End file.
